Whenever I meet Fabian it’s like Vienna in the last days of World War I. I always arrive a bit too late at the coffee house, because he’s expecting that from me. There is always some sort of rage inside of him, even when he appears to be gentle. That’s not even an act, but his soul’s innermost desire: peace and stuff. But the rage is waiting in the backroom of his mind, ready to make a big entrance in the salon.
On Fridays I light his candles for him while making jokes about his French-Polish-Hamburg-Irish-Brazilian-Jewish roots.
So while we sit at the coffeehouse table, as it behooves us, he’s doing his “sad puppy eyes” thing. He’s haunted by caffeine and sugar, just like alcohol always found its way to Joseph Roth. And then we argue about Karl Kraus until we’ve finished our apfelstrudel with cream.
All of this is pure fabrication, of course. Actually whenever I’m Berlin we meet in the lobby of Hotel Adlon, very formal, like two strange spies in a John Le Carré novel. That is the truth.
Fabian Wolff hides behind the facade of a normal young man. He’s even publishing under that name: in the Jüdische Allgemeine, Intro or HEEB. He often listens to music by dead people or reads books by corpses or thinks about Natalie Wood. He’s probably working on a stand-up routine for the Christmas party of the staff of the Cinémathèque française. Mostly Tarkovsky puns I think.
Very inconspicuous – or at least we hope so. But still, he’s a spy at heart.